WWW8 Notes - Predictions

07/10/2000
by Edward Piou

It's been over a year since WWW8 - the Eighth Annual World-Wide Web Conference - took place in Toronto, Canada. Several books from early web technologists (including Tim Berners-Lee himself) have come out since then, tracing their views of the development of the Web. In addition to looking at the past, though, many of the WWW8 attendees had an eye toward the future. It's worth looking now at the predictions made by two of the conference speakers and see the progress we've made.

Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

Much of Tim Berners-Lee's keynote dealt with his vision of a "semantic web" - a web where both basic information, and machine-understandable information about using basic information, would be important. A lot of technological progress has been made, in developing both XML and the tools and protocols - including SOAP - that will make distributed, automatic data exchange a reality. But the semantic web still isn't here - the web is still about information, rather than meta-information exchange, and in the trenches, designers and programmers are still not working on a truly distributed medium.

Of course, distributed technologies like Gnutella - which make every computer a server, and use the network to great effect - may eventually provide a quicker and more robust route to inter-computer resource sharing than the technologies currently being developed in the more traditional, standards-based, top-down means.

view a printable version of this article